The Paleolithic Age, Era or Period, is a prehistoric period of human history distinguished by the development of the most primitive stone tools discovered, and covers roughly 99% of human technological prehistory. It extends from the earliest known use of stone tools, probably by Hominins such as Australopithecines, 2.6 million years ago, to the end of the Pleistocene around 10,000 BP.The Paleolithic era is followed by the Mesolithic. The date of the Paleolithic—Mesolithic boundary may vary by locality as much as several thousand years.
During the Paleolithic, humans grouped together in small societies such as bands, and subsisted by gathering plants and hunting or scavenging wild animals. The Paleolithic is characterized by the use of knapped stone tools, although at the time humans also used wood and bone tools. Other organic commodities were adapted for use as tools, including leather and vegetable fibers; however, due to their nature, these have not been preserved to any great degree. Surviving artifacts of the Paleolithic era are known as paleoliths. Humankind gradually evolved from early members of the genus Homo such as Homo habilis — who used simple stone tools — into fully behaviorally and anatomically modern humans (Homo sapiens sapiens) during the Paleolithic era.During the end of the Paleolithic, specifically the Middle and or Upper Paleolithic, humans began to produce the earliest works of art and engage in religious and spiritual behavior such as burial and ritual.The climate during the Paleolithic consisted of a set of glacial and interglacial periods in which the climate periodically fluctuated between warm and cool temperatures.
-from Wikipedia
chauvet2.jpg
Painting of Horses from the Chauvet Cave Science 20 November 1998: Vol. 282 no. 5393 p. 1451 DOI: 10.1126/science.282.5393.1451 NEWS ART Evolution or Revolution? Tim Appenzeller Human artistic ability burst forth in an explosion of creativity 38,000 years ago in ice age Europe—but was this the world's first flowering of artistic talent?
Sometime around 250,000 years ago, an early human living on the Golan Heights in the Middle East picked up a lump of volcanic tuff the size of a plum and started scratching at it with a harder stone, deepening its natural crevices. Not long afterward, a volcanic eruption buried the soft pebble in a bed of ash, preserving it from erosion. A quarter of a million years later, in 1980, archaeologists dug it up, and since then, the pebble has been the object of rapt attention—far more, perhaps, than it got when it was new. By chance or design, those long-ago scratchings created what looks like a female figure—and a puzzle for the archaeologists who study the beginnings of art.
To many archaeologists, art—or symbolic representation, as they prefer to call it—burst on the scene after 50,000 years ago, a time when modern humans are widely thought to have migrated out of Africa to the far corners of the globe. These scholars say the migrants brought with them an ability to manipulate symbols and make images that earlier humans had lacked. An explosion of art resulted, its epicenter in ice age Europe starting about 40,000 years ago, when most anthropologists believe modern humans were replacing the earlier Neandertal people. The new Europeans decorated their bodies with beads and pierced animal teeth, carved exquisite figurines from ivory and stone, and painted hauntingly lifelike animals on the walls of deep caves.
A night at the pictures, caveman style: Prehistoric artists 'used cartoon-like techniques to make their paintings move'By DAMIEN GAYLE PUBLISHED: 16:25 EST, 23 September 2012 | UPDATED: 17:59 EST, 23 September 2012
Prehistoric cave artists used cartoon-like techniques to give the impression that their images were moving across cave walls, two French researchers have suggested. A new study of cave art across France - in which animals appear to have multiple limbs, heads and tails - has found that the paintings are actually primitive attempts at animation. When the images are viewed under the unsteady light of flickering flames the images can appear to move as the animals they represent do, the research claims.
Clever: Ancient artists at France's Chauvet Cave superimposed drawings of two bison to create an eight-legged beast intended to depict trotting or running, two researchers say
Clever: Ancient artists at France's Chauvet Cave superimposed drawings of two bison to create an eight-legged beast intended to depict trotting or running, two researchers say
Clever: Ancient artists at France's Chauvet Cave superimposed drawings of two bison to create an eight-legged beast intended to depict trotting or running, two researchers say It is also believed that prehistoric relics previously thought to have been used as buttons were actually designed as thaumatropes - double sided pictures that can be spun to blur the images into an animation. The startling findings are reported by archaeologist Marc Azéma of the University of Toulouse-Le Mirail and artist Florent Rivère in the June issue of Antiquity. They make the incredible claim that prehistoric man foreshadowed the invention of cinema by creating art with a rudimentary understanding of the principle of persistence of vision.
Grab from an animation by Marc Azema
Grab from an animation by Marc Azema
Mr Azéma, after 20 years researching Stone Age animation techniques, has identified 53 paintings in 12 French caves which superimpose two or more images to apparently represent movement. They show animals trotting, galloping, tossing their heads or shaking their tails. 'Lascaux (a complex of caves in south-west France] is the cave with the greatest number of cases of split-action movement by superimposition of successive images,' Mr Azéma was quoted by Discovery as saying.
Grab from an animation by Marc Azema
Grab from an animation by Marc Azema
'Some 20 animals, principally horses, have the head, legs or tail multiplied.' When these paintings are viewed by flickering torchlight the animated effect 'achieves its full imact', he added. Mr Azéma and Mr Rivère claim their remarkable theory is backed up by the discovery that ancient engraved discs were used as thaumatropes - formerly claimed to have been invented in 1825 by astronomer John Hershel.
Caveman animation: This sequence of grabs shows how the cave paintings apparently show movement by superimposing different sets of legs
Caveman animation: This sequence of grabs shows how the cave paintings apparently show movement by superimposing different sets of legs
Caveman animation: This sequence of grabs shows how the cave paintings apparently show movement by superimposing different sets of legs A popular toy in Victorian times, thaumatropes (literally meaning 'miracle wheels') were discs or cards with a picture in each side attached to a piece of string. When the string was twirled quickly between the fingers the two pictures appear to combine into a single animated image.
Mr Rivère believes that Palaeolithic artists created similar optical toys well before their apparent invention in the 19th century. He examined pierced bone discs found in the area around the Pyrenees, which have previously been interpreted as buttons or pendants. The researchers discovered that if a string was threaded through the central hole of some of these discs and stretched tight to make it spin, the result was a single persistent image of movement.
The hunt: Seen lit by flickering torchlight, the images appear to move thanks to the optical phenomenon known as the persistence of vision, the researchers claim
The hunt: Seen lit by flickering torchlight, the images appear to move thanks to the optical phenomenon known as the persistence of vision, the researchers claim
The hunt: Another painting in the Chauvet cave. Seen lit by flickering torchlight, the images appear to move thanks to the optical phenomenon known as the persistence of vision, the researchers claim In the most convincing case, a bone disc found in 1868 in the Dordogne, one side features a standing doe, while on the reverse the animal is lying down. Spun, the animal appears to get up and down repeatedly. Mr Azéma and Mr Rivère believe in these flickering images can be seen the earliest origins of cinema. 'Palaeolithic thaumatropes can be claimed as the earliest of the attempts to represent movement that culminated in the invention of the cinematic camera,' they wrote.
1. DISCOVERY The most famous early image of a human, a woman, is the so-called "Venus" of Willendorf, found in 1908 by the archaeologist Josef Szombathy [see BIBLIOGRAPHY] in an Aurignacian loess deposit in a terrace about 30 meters above the Danube river near the town of Willendorf in Austria.
The earliest notice of its discovery appeared in a report by the Yale anthropologist George Grant MacCurdy (1863-1947) who happened to be in Vienna in the summer of 1908. Although the greater part of the collection of finds from the site had not yet been unpacked, MacCurdy reported excitedly that before he left Vienna Szombathy had very kindly shown him a single remarkable specimen - a human figurine, full length, carved out of stone. Read more at...........
LETTER FROM SOUTHERN FRANCE FIRST IMPRESSIONS What does the world’s oldest art say about us? by Judith Thurman JUNE 23, 2008
A frieze of horses and rhinos near the Chauvet cave’s Megaloceros Gallery, where artists may have gathered to make charcoal for drawing. Chauvet contains the earliest known paintings, from at least thirty-two thousand years ago.
During the Old Stone Age, between thirty-seven thousand and eleven thousand years ago, some of the most remarkable art ever conceived was etched or painted on the walls of caves in southern France and northern Spain. After a visit to Lascaux, in the Dordogne, which was discovered in 1940, Picasso reportedly said to his guide, “They’ve invented everything.” What those first artists invented was a language of signs for which there will never be a Rosetta stone; perspective, a technique that was not rediscovered until the Athenian Golden Age; and a bestiary of such vitality and finesse that, by the flicker of torchlight, the animals seem to surge from the walls, and move across them like figures in a magiclantern show (in that sense, the artists invented animation). They also thought up the grease lamp—a lump of fat, with a plant wick, placed in a hollow stone—to light their workplace; scaffolds to reach high places; the principles of stencilling and Pointillism; powdered colors, brushes, and stumping cloths; and, more to the point of Picasso’s insight, the very concept of an image. A true artist reimagines that concept with every blank canvas—but not from a void..........continue reading at http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/06/23/080623fa_fact_thurman#ixzz1eOgy6tkp
Paleolithic Camera Obscura
The First Artists
blue-star-md.png
Map of Lascaux and information regarding transferring images from Lascaux to Lascaux 2
Paleolithic Art
The Paleolithic Age, Era or Period, is a prehistoric period of human history distinguished by the development of the most primitive stone tools discovered, and covers roughly 99% of human technological prehistory. It extends from the earliest known use of stone tools, probably by Hominins such as Australopithecines, 2.6 million years ago, to the end of the Pleistocene around 10,000 BP.The Paleolithic era is followed by the Mesolithic. The date of the Paleolithic—Mesolithic boundary may vary by locality as much as several thousand years.
During the Paleolithic, humans grouped together in small societies such as bands, and subsisted by gathering plants and hunting or scavenging wild animals. The Paleolithic is characterized by the use of knapped stone tools, although at the time humans also used wood and bone tools. Other organic commodities were adapted for use as tools, including leather and vegetable fibers; however, due to their nature, these have not been preserved to any great degree. Surviving artifacts of the Paleolithic era are known as paleoliths. Humankind gradually evolved from early members of the genus Homo such as Homo habilis — who used simple stone tools — into fully behaviorally and anatomically modern humans (Homo sapiens sapiens) during the Paleolithic era.During the end of the Paleolithic, specifically the Middle and or Upper Paleolithic, humans began to produce the earliest works of art and engage in religious and spiritual behavior such as burial and ritual.The climate during the Paleolithic consisted of a set of glacial and interglacial periods in which the climate periodically fluctuated between warm and cool temperatures.
-from Wikipedia
Science 20 November 1998:
Vol. 282 no. 5393 p. 1451
DOI: 10.1126/science.282.5393.1451
NEWS
ART
Evolution or Revolution?
Tim Appenzeller
Human artistic ability burst forth in an explosion of creativity 38,000 years ago in ice age Europe—but was this the world's first flowering of artistic talent?
Sometime around 250,000 years ago, an early human living on the Golan Heights in the Middle East picked up a lump of volcanic tuff the size of a plum and started scratching at it with a harder stone, deepening its natural crevices. Not long afterward, a volcanic eruption buried the soft pebble in a bed of ash, preserving it from erosion. A quarter of a million years later, in 1980, archaeologists dug it up, and since then, the pebble has been the object of rapt attention—far more, perhaps, than it got when it was new. By chance or design, those long-ago scratchings created what looks like a female figure—and a puzzle for the archaeologists who study the beginnings of art.
To many archaeologists, art—or symbolic representation, as they prefer to call it—burst on the scene after 50,000 years ago, a time when modern humans are widely thought to have migrated out of Africa to the far corners of the globe. These scholars say the migrants brought with them an ability to manipulate symbols and make images that earlier humans had lacked. An explosion of art resulted, its epicenter in ice age Europe starting about 40,000 years ago, when most anthropologists believe modern humans were replacing the earlier Neandertal people. The new Europeans decorated their bodies with beads and pierced animal teeth, carved exquisite figurines from ivory and stone, and painted hauntingly lifelike animals on the walls of deep caves.
Continue reading at.............http://www.sciencemag.org/content/282/5393/1451.full
More articles about Paleolithic Art and the explosion of human creativity
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffwi29JCIpQ&feature=youtube_gdata_player
A night at the pictures, caveman style: Prehistoric artists 'used cartoon-like techniques to make their paintings move'By DAMIEN GAYLE
PUBLISHED: 16:25 EST, 23 September 2012 | UPDATED: 17:59 EST, 23 September 2012
Prehistoric cave artists used cartoon-like techniques to give the impression that their images were moving across cave walls, two French researchers have suggested.
A new study of cave art across France - in which animals appear to have multiple limbs, heads and tails - has found that the paintings are actually primitive attempts at animation.
When the images are viewed under the unsteady light of flickering flames the images can appear to move as the animals they represent do, the research claims.
It is also believed that prehistoric relics previously thought to have been used as buttons were actually designed as thaumatropes - double sided pictures that can be spun to blur the images into an animation.
The startling findings are reported by archaeologist Marc Azéma of the University of Toulouse-Le Mirail and artist Florent Rivère in the June issue of Antiquity.
They make the incredible claim that prehistoric man foreshadowed the invention of cinema by creating art with a rudimentary understanding of the principle of persistence of vision.
They show animals trotting, galloping, tossing their heads or shaking their tails.
'Lascaux (a complex of caves in south-west France] is the cave with the greatest number of cases of split-action movement by superimposition of successive images,' Mr Azéma was quoted by Discovery as saying.
Mr Azéma and Mr Rivère claim their remarkable theory is backed up by the discovery that ancient engraved discs were used as thaumatropes - formerly claimed to have been invented in 1825 by astronomer John Hershel.
A popular toy in Victorian times, thaumatropes (literally meaning 'miracle wheels') were discs or cards with a picture in each side attached to a piece of string.
When the string was twirled quickly between the fingers the two pictures appear to combine into a single animated image.
Mr Rivère believes that Palaeolithic artists created similar optical toys well before their apparent invention in the 19th century.
He examined pierced bone discs found in the area around the Pyrenees, which have previously been interpreted as buttons or pendants.
The researchers discovered that if a string was threaded through the central hole of some of these discs and stretched tight to make it spin, the result was a single persistent image of movement.
In the most convincing case, a bone disc found in 1868 in the Dordogne, one side features a standing doe, while on the reverse the animal is lying down. Spun, the animal appears to get up and down repeatedly.
Mr Azéma and Mr Rivère believe in these flickering images can be seen the earliest origins of cinema.
'Palaeolithic thaumatropes can be claimed as the earliest of the attempts to represent movement that culminated in the invention of the cinematic camera,' they wrote.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Christopher L. C. E. Witcombe
1. DISCOVERY
The most famous early image of a human, a woman, is the so-called "Venus" of Willendorf, found in 1908 by the archaeologist Josef Szombathy [see BIBLIOGRAPHY] in an Aurignacian loess deposit in a terrace about 30 meters above the Danube river near the town of Willendorf in Austria.
The earliest notice of its discovery appeared in a report by the Yale anthropologist George Grant MacCurdy (1863-1947) who happened to be in Vienna in the summer of 1908. Although the greater part of the collection of finds from the site had not yet been unpacked, MacCurdy reported excitedly that before he left Vienna Szombathy had very kindly shown him a single remarkable specimen - a human figurine, full length, carved out of stone. Read more at...........
http://arthistoryresources.net/willendorf/
LETTER FROM SOUTHERN FRANCE
FIRST IMPRESSIONS
What does the world’s oldest art say about us?
by Judith Thurman
JUNE 23, 2008
A frieze of horses and rhinos near the Chauvet cave’s Megaloceros Gallery, where artists may have gathered to make charcoal for drawing. Chauvet contains the earliest known paintings, from at least thirty-two thousand years ago.
During the Old Stone Age, between thirty-seven thousand and eleven thousand years ago, some of the most remarkable art ever conceived was etched or painted on the walls of caves in southern France and northern Spain. After a visit to Lascaux, in the Dordogne, which was discovered in 1940, Picasso reportedly said to his guide, “They’ve invented everything.” What those first artists invented was a language of signs for which there will never be a Rosetta stone; perspective, a technique that was not rediscovered until the Athenian Golden Age; and a bestiary of such vitality and finesse that, by the flicker of torchlight, the animals seem to surge from the walls, and move across them like figures in a magiclantern show (in that sense, the artists invented animation). They also thought up the grease lamp—a lump of fat, with a plant wick, placed in a hollow stone—to light their workplace; scaffolds to reach high places; the principles of stencilling and Pointillism; powdered colors, brushes, and stumping cloths; and, more to the point of Picasso’s insight, the very concept of an image. A true artist reimagines that concept with every blank canvas—but not from a void..........continue reading at http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/06/23/080623fa_fact_thurman#ixzz1eOgy6tkp
Paleolithic Camera Obscura
The First Artists
Keynote Presentation